Cult of the Devourer
Cult of the Devourer is a survivor-like where you play as an ancient lovecraftian parasite terrorizing the townsfolk in a village.
Cult of the Devourer is a unique twist on the survivor-like genre. The innovative core mechanic in Cult of the Devourer is that the player must continually eat food resources in order to survive. If the players hunger bar runs out the player begins losing health. This ensures that the player must always be destroying enemies in order to keep playing.
This game was developed in a team of six from March 2025 to May 2025. On this project I fulfilled the role of both a programmer and a designer.
Summary of work and contributions
- Programmed gameplay for large portion of player attacks.
- Programmed player movement.
- Programmed enemy spawn system.
- Played a major role in the design and evolution of the games core hunger mechanic and enemy mechanic design.
- Programed and balanced the games core hunger mechanic.
- Conducted play testing and utilized iterative design processes to incrementally improve gameplay from player feedback.
Programming of Player Attacks
Cult of the Devourer has four total attacks available to the player. The attacks are as follows:
- The tentacle
- Miasma
- Eldritch laser
- Flesh gnawerer
Each attack has a different behavior and different statistics that needed to work in tandem with my fellow programmers upgrade system.
Image of player using the miasma attack. The glowing purple circle around the player deals damage to enemies but is only usable temporarily. This attack was designed so players had to get close to enemies if they wanted to make the most of this attack. Thus creating a push and pull between wanting to deal maximum damage and not getting injured.
Image of player using the flesh gnawerer. This attack can go through multiple enemies at a time but would only fire at a random enemy.
Image of player using the tentacle attack. This is the player basic attack and can be directed with the mouse button. While this is unusual for a survivor like we felt it gave the player more agency and more to do in game.
Image of the player using the Eldritch laser. This was a more rapid fire projectile and targeted whatever was closest to the player.
Enemy spawn system
The enemy spawning for Cult of the Devourer was done in a way so that the no matter what direction the player traveled there would always be enemies. The spawn system also determines the spawn rates of each enemy type depending on the players level. The spawn rates of each enemy needed to be adjusted so that it created a challenging but still manageable difficulty for an entire play through of the game.
Image of the player at Level 1. The game is just spawning peasant enemies at this point.
Image of the player at level 14. The player has become completely overtaken by the parasite. The spawn system is throwing all three enemy types at the player now.
Enemy gameplay design
Many design decisions for Cult of the Devourer were made during group discussions with the entire team. While much of this games identity comes from productive design discussion with the team many of the games core mechanics and design direction are a result of my contributions.
We decided to have three enemy types in total. This was done to create variety within gameplay and ensure that we would have highly polished enemies within the time frame that we were given.